The curious cowering of Marco Rubio

Get the Point

Well over a decade ago, I sat next to then U.S. Senator (and current Secretary of State) Marco Rubio at a breakfast meeting in downtown Tallahassee during my time serving as general counsel for the Florida State Conference of Branches of the NAACP. For about 15 minutes, maybe less, we engaged in basic discourse about our mutual ties to the City of Miami and the University of Florida before the program began and he delivered keynote remarks.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio

While it's impossible to get a full measure of a person during a relatively brief chat, I found him to be affable and his subsequent speech criticizing then President Barack Obama's administration about fiscal spending to be well articulated—even though I disagreed with just about every single point that he made that morning.

In the years that followed, as Sen. Rubio was labeled a "rising star" and deemed by Time magazine (see below) and a number of pundits as the Republican Party's best hope to win the 2016 election, I made sure to pay careful attention whenever he appeared on Sunday news shows articulating his vision for America's future. And when President Obama continued his push to normalize relations with Cuba, as a Florida native, I paid very close attention to Rubio's position that such was unwise due to Cuba, his ancestral homeland, being gripped in the throes of communist tyranny, first under Fidel Castro and later, under the rule of his brother, Raul Castro.

Over the past decade from his Senate office, Rubio arguably has been the most vocal critic of leftist and left leaning dictatorships in Latin America, blasting Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti with equal aplomb—while warning about the dangers of communist China exerting influence in the Western Hemisphere.

This past January, Rubio’s passion and particular opposition to communist Cuban Castroism were on display during his confirmation hearings to become Secretary of State, where he opined, "the moment of truth is arriving. Cuba is literally collapsing, both generationally, in terms of all the young people leaving, but also economically...They are now living on 21-hour rolling blackouts and some days longer, because Marxism doesn't work, because they are corrupt, and because they are inept.”

Cognizant of Rubio's longtime enmity towards communism, in general, and dictators specifically, I find it curious (and hypocritical) to see him so easily cower to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, the former Soviet KGB agent who longs for the return of Russian territorial boundaries and world influence that it has not seen since the end of the Cold War in 1991.

When I first read that then President-elect Trump would appoint Rubio as Secretary of State last November, I was rather surprised when considering that Rubio, unlike Trump, was a staunch supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a critic of Putin's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Lest we forget that in May of 2022, Sen. Rubio voted in favor of military and economic aid to Ukraine even as then private citizen Trump was critical of the aid packet from his golf links in South Florida.

But as is typical these days in the MAGA Republican Party, Rubio, the once hawkish communism critic, has fallen in line behind the Kremlin compromised Trump and his equally compromised Vice President, J.D. Vance, and their mendacious insistence that Russia, not Ukraine, is the victim in a war that's lasted for three long years and counting.

As I have written on Facebook and analyzed in this blog yesterday, this past Friday's summit between President Trump and President Zelensky was nothing short of an ambush; when Zelensky approached Trump and exchanged handshakes, Trump's very first petty comment was to criticize Zelensky for wearing fatigues instead of a business suit.

With the fate of Ukraine and the potential of a greater conflict in Europe that could signal World War III in the balance, at least one equally idiotic "journalist," Brian Glenn of Real America’s Voice, took a jab Zelensky's sartorial choices, too, by asking "do you own a suit?"and insisting that his dress style was “disrespectful.”

Funny how no MAGA Republican considered Elon Musk wearing a T-shirt and allowing his toddler to run amok in the Oval Office two weeks ago “disrespectful”…

Zelensky, a former comedian by trade, held his temper but not his penchant for sobering humor by reminding Glenn with a slight smirk that when the war is over, perhaps he will "buy a costume" or "a suit." And when Vance, like the sniveling lickspittle that he has quickly become, insisted that Zelensky, who was there about the business of saving his nation and preventing a scaled up war in Europe, was not showing "respect" or "gratitude" to President Trump, well, the reality was crystal clear that this "meeting" was not held in democratic good faith, but an ambush to show solidarity with Putin's regime in Russia!

Still, while Trump and Vance played the fool, there sat Secretary Rubio looking as if he wished that he was anywhere but there at that moment. Rubio's body language and lack of laughter and yucking it up like the other MAGA idiots in the room were enough to inform me that he KNOWS that Zelensky was being treated with disrespect, but as he has made his own deal with the proverbial devil to boost his credentials for another run at the presidency in 2028, he sat there cowering...in silence...to avoid the wrath of Trump on social media! A wrath, I remind, that could end a Rubio '28 presidential campaign before it even gets off the ground…

The eyes (and clenched hands) never lie…

Even worse, after maintaining relative silence during the ambush, Rubio, the once sharp tongued critic of communism and defender of democracy, went on air and did his master Trump's bidding, saying in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Zelensky needed to “apologize for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became...There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic."

Sigh, Rubio’s “blame the victim” rhetoric was nothing short of a clear (and dangerous) sign of narcissism…

To conclude, America, no make that the world, is waiting for someone, anyone, within the Republican Party to stare Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or J.D. Vance in the eyes and tell them when they're wrong. Sadly, courage seems in short supply from the right and our longtime worldwide allies must now exercise their rights to arm and defend themselves from communist aggression in the form of Russia, China, and to our chagrin, an American government that hasn't just turned a blind eye toward tyranny—but is inclined to give it a helping hand by threatening isolation.